Sorry for the long post; it's to make up for my absence of a normal post in Week 4.
These past two weeks were the start of Assignment 3, and the grouping/project choosing process for the final project. I tell my non-3216 friends to get feedback about my assignment 3 idea, and they're all like "what you have 3 assignments already?". Yes, and I'm really starting to feel the heat.
My Assignment 3 group was truly random this time. I had honestly resigned myself to the randoming, but somehow managed to get trolled by my luck again. At the end of week 4, Sun sent out an email telling about 10 of us that there would be some randoming to do if we did not form groups by that weekend. Not long after that email, a friend-of-friend asked me to join her group, and I accepted, thinking that maybe it was a good choice to make. And on the next day, I found out that the remaining two groups would have some overlaps with Assignments 1 and 2, so I had to get transferred to another group. So much for trying to decide my own fate.
In any case, with the slight caveat of an unresponsive team member, our group of 3 programmers seemed quite okay. I think these two are quite good in what they do, especially the full-stack developer who seems to have a wealth of experience. I can't say the same for myself, though. Trying to learn AngularJS and Ionic without any experience with frontend frameworks is somewhat difficult, and the haze is not helping at all. All day everyday I just feel sickly and unfocused; I feel bad not being able to contribute to the code, and even worse that as the project manager I'm not sure how to push my team forward. I mean, how can I tell the team what to do when I'm not making any visible changes myself?
The idea we are working on is one that I suggested, from a problem that I faced myself. A taxi route planner/recommendation for multiple stops - in my experience with GrabCar (uses a fixed rate for the in-app route), our driver was really unhappy with us when we asked to get off at different places. When I first thought of it, I felt it had potential to be useful, and expandable. Adding in features like estimated fare and collaborative functions help it as a taxi-sharing app, but in general it could work as a car-pooling app, or even for a person who wants to make multiple stops with one car. That said, I still can't figure out whether we should focus on the taxi use case or make it more general - on one hand, we may restrict usage, and on the other we may make users' mental image of our app unclear.
On to the final project: my final project group is...NOT random. Thankfully. I think we have a strong team this time, selected from past teams.
The external pitches were interesting, and I was particularly surprised to learn that there were perks (bribes!) for working with certain companies. They were really tempting, but after a bit of rational thought I realise the project ideas did not appeal to me as much. I was particularly interested in Thankyou.to, which I felt had a lot of potential, both in terms of learning as well as market value. Through Gerald's pitch, I could already visualise how the interface would look like, and its impact on a customer of the users' websites. I also want to try building the widget and social media crawling as I think these are useful skills to have for future web development. I'm a little biased towards this project now, and I feel a little unfair to my teammates cause I probably seem quite set on this.
The internal pitches were okay, with a few ideas that really stood out. I felt that it took a little too long, though. There were a few ideas that were debated over for quite a while without going anywhere. That said, I particularly liked EventSpark - those guys are geniuses. Seeing upcoming projects like 6degrees and QuickDesk also helped to remind me that a successful app is possible, and refuel my motivation. And on that note, it's time to get back to work.
Got to work harder, and stop letting my teammates down.
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